She was 43 years old when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. And when his world turned upside down. She was a mother, a disappointed novelist, and a budding illustrator drawing children’s books.
With the disease she made a click: at 61, the American Jennifer Hayden, consecrated cartoonist, affirms without hesitation that if it had not been for that tumor she would never have become the woman that, without knowing it, she had always wanted to be.
Paradoxically, lolas had been a theme in his life. “I grew up in a home where Playboy magazine was on the coffee table, and my father was obsessed with breasts.” Somehow, she deduced that the answers to all the questions were there.
In adolescence she suffered because they didn’t seem to grow up, later motherhood turned them into protagonists; finally came the cancer. When he got over it, his first graphic novel was born, story of my boobs, an illustrated journey, with humor and lucidity, of those who managed to survive mandates and commonplaces about the feminine condition. “By losing my breasts,” she said, “I realized that I don’t need them to feel like a woman.”
It was not the only thing he understood: after cancer he quit his job. Not knowing how much time he had left, he decided that he was not going to dedicate himself to anything that did not come from his heart. “The disease came to finish off what I needed to do with my dignity, my self-control, and with my internal censor. I completely sent everything to the devil and said to myself: ‘I’m going to do this in the nude.
Over eight years he drafted his book. And she advises today, to those who in the middle of life have a project or a dream, simply get excited and start it, and not hold back thinking that there is something that needs to be learned. Within one, she says, is already the wisdom to achieve it.
